http://www.delaservitudemoderne.org/video-en.html

In all honesty, I am amazed by the text used by this video. I felt like very single sentence deserved to become a famous quote.
This video is a good critic of the current consumerist society (in my opinion).

What do you guys think of it?
And what do you think of Direct Action (manifestations themselves just as the acts of symbolic destructions that some times comes with it, but it can also take many other forms)?
Would Anarchy be the real solution? I'm starting to think so.

You will likely get more responses if you post a transcript or summarize (very well) the video. I know that I'm not going to watch it, but I might argue if you summarize it in a paragraph or two.

You have the text of the movie written down there: http://www.delaservitudemoderne.org/text.html

Basically, the guy says we're being controlled by the Big Boss (multinationals) and that money has become our new God, our whole being determined by it. Consumerism enslaves the whole population just as it kills the Third World... a lose/lose situation.
He also accuses companies for trying to blame consumers about their habits while they are really the ones who are creating this whole environmental mess. "Bourgeois' Ecology" it is called,as far as I know. Companies change a bit just to try to earn even more profit from the consumers, and consumers are sure the world's going to be alright if they recycle, while the real thing that'll save us all is to reduce our compulsive consumerism.
He blames medias and publicity for manipulating people.
And he concludes with an incentive to (violent?) direct action.
At the very end, he also claims that the video is free from any intellectual property and that images and sounds stolen from another work aren't credited (because intellectual property is a bad thing).

I believe that's a good summary, yet it's out of memory, and I might not have understood it completely: I promised myself to go over the whole text and annotate it during my incoming summer trip.

Crazy whackjob. Might as well listen to the Taliban whine about how evil everyone else is.

... or you can try to understand a bit more anarchism.

No. Someone who compares money to god is not worth listening to.

I do believe our modern society is the slave of money, thus determined by it.

I like money, but I don't like money enough to sacrifice my dreams. :\ what do?

What kind of dreams?
While it is indeed not that hard to find a dream which doesn't involve money, nowadays, people just don't realize how many dreams they have that rely nearly solely on money.

My dream is to have money.

WEALTH IS THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES, BLINDING US AND LEADING US ALL OFF A CLIFF TO OUR OWN DEMISE. COME, COMRADE. SEE THE GLORY OF THE STATE. TOGETHER WE CAN BUILD THE MOST GLORIOUS NATION.

He's far from wanting a State, just so you know.

Didn't watch video, (tl;dr) but I read your summary.

But anarchism is fatally flawed. Someone will try to dominate someone else, and eventually order will arise out of disorder.

And what's so bad about gaining money? Inequality is unavoidable. It's unfortunate that some people have to live in terrible conditions, but corporations exist to make profit, not to help people. The ideal world would allow every person an equal opportunity, but life doesn't work like that.

This made Zeitgeist look like Waiting on Superman. It's literally just a monotone chanting of flowery sounding quotes, mixed over stolen video clips of less than memorable Armageddon-themed movies. Time officially wasted; didn't even hear so much as a new twist on the "you're all sheep/slaves!" cry. Totally disappoint.

How is anarchism so fatally flawed?
Self-sufficiency of small groups of people organizing themselves based on direct democracy really doesn't seems flawed to me. A small group of people wanting to take over the rest would just eventually get torn apart by the rest of the population... and the only fact that the whole system would be based upon the fact that people organize themselves in small groups would probably prevent people from wanting to take the control over.

EDIT: And who talked of disorder? As far as I've read about anarchy, it's not about "No laws/rules/order" at all. It's about "No rulers". There's a huge difference. And in fact, there are rulers: the whole population itself.
Direct democracy looks like a very good way to manage stuff together, in the order and equity.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 30 2011, 5:12 am by payne.

Although people do not conform to a pack setting such as wolves or other wild animals, we crave order and a status quo. When those don't exist, humans pretty much go crazy.

We started out in anarchy. Society ordered itself - tribes, city-states, nations. And it'll happen again. If we remove all of that, it'll happen again.

I just started reading books about anarchism, and it's really interesting.
One of the wrongful ideas a lot of people associate to anarchism is the fact that anarchists are against any form of power. Well, if I understood properly (so far), there can be mandated people to take care of certain problems, only thing being that whenever people think they aren't satisfying their needs, they can revoke their mandate. What I currently am not understanding very well if how this actually is different from representative democracy since, as far as I know, we currently can get the power away from a politician by doing a mass revolt (think of Egypt). I'll have to study a bit more this part of anarchism.

@Centreri: If I understood properly, people aren't supposed to rally themselves on ultra-large scales because then the system implodes due to the difficulties to apply properly direct democracy on extremely large number of people. And since anarchy is based on the fact that people want to live free of any form of oppression, they wouldn't want to rally up on large-scale because it'd imply the loss of their current political freedom.

Unfortunately, it's inefficient. Think of having to vote on whether the speed limit on Main Street should be 35 or 40 miles per hour. and multiply those tiny decisions by 1000 every day. Of course, you could elect a committee or commissioner to make those sorts of decisions for the general public, but that would go against anarchist principle.

This assumes the entire population believes the same thing--freedom is the most important virtue. A small group of people may feel greedy (as any human feels like he should be better than his neighbor) and steal/take over another small group and their resources. In theory, other groups should come to the defenders' aid and stop the aggressors, but in reality, they might not. Isolationism might take hold ("It's not my problem") and allow atrocities to occur. And as you said, a centralized use of power to deter or destroy any aggressors would go against anarchist political theory.

Side note: I've been playing Fallout 3 over the past couple of weeks, and their society seems somewhat anarchistic.

In fact, it wouldn't go against anarchist principle: it is part of their beliefs. No one really know about this since there are very few that actually tried to understand deeply this political view.